A Fatal Grace

by Louise Penny

  Gamache walked out of the tiny room and made for Agent Isabelle Lacoste’s station.

  ‘What’ve you got?’

  ‘I’ve been at it all morning and I can’t find anything on Cecilia de Poitiers or her parents. Nothing. I scanned her book, weird stuff by the way, to see if I could find any clues there. You’d mentioned France, so I’d already put in a request to the Sûreté there. Half an hour ago I got this reply.’

  Gamache leaned into the computer and read the email from Paris.

  Do not bother us with hoaxes.

  ‘Well, zut alors,’ said Gamache. ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I wrote this.’ She showed him another email.

  Dear stupid, ridiculous fuckers, You running dog assholes in the almighty Sûreté in Paris have your heads so far up your asses you wouldn’t know a legitimate inquiry if one bit you on your scrawny little testicles. We’re busy solving crimes here while you’re dreaming of the day you have half the intelligence we have, you pig-shit farts.

  Sincerely, Agent Isabelle Lacoste, Sûreté du Qúebec.

  ‘That’s certainly one way to handle it.’ Gamache smiled.

  Beauvoir was impressed and looking forward to another fantasy.

  ‘I didn’t send it.’ Lacoste looked wistfully at the message. ‘Instead I placed a call to the homicide squad in Paris,’ she said. ‘If I don’t hear from them in a few minutes I’ll call again. I don’t understand their answer. Have you had dealings with them, sir?’

  ‘A few. I’ve never had a reply like that.’ He looked again at the terse message from Paris. It was yet another thing about this case that seemed to make no sense.

  Why would they think this was a hoax?

  Gamache sat at his desk and began to go through the stack of papers and messages waiting for him. He came across Lemieux’s list of the contents of CC de Poitiers’s garbage. It was a routine check and rarely helpful since murderers were almost never stupid enough to just throw evidence in their own trash. But Richard Lyon had struck Gamache as, if not stupid, at least close kin to it.

  He got himself a coffee, sat down and began reading.

  Assorted foods

  Milk and pizza cartons

  Old, broken bracelet

  Two wine bottles, cheap variety

  Newspapers

  Empty cereal box, fruit loops

  A video cassette – The Lion in Winter

  Plastic juice containers

  Candy wrappers – Mars bars

  Gift wrapping

  Box from Inuit shop in Montreal

  These people certainly didn’t believe in recycling, thought Gamache. He presumed the video was broken and that the box from the Inuit shop had contained the boots. There was no material for wiring up a heat lamp. There was no empty container of windshield washer fluid.

  Too much to ask, really.

  Saul Petrov paced the living room of his rented chalet. Outside the snow was beginning to let up. Should he tell the cops about what CC had said? She’d been looking for something in Three Pines, she’d made that clear enough. Money, he was sure. Had she found it?

  He’d visited her husband that morning after talking to the Sûreté, just to try to get a feel for the place, and maybe snoop around. Richard Lyon had been cool; unwelcoming even. In fact, his response had surprised Petrov. He hadn’t thought the man capable of standing up for himself. Lyon had always seemed so weak, so bumbling. But he’d managed to make it clear that Saul wasn’t welcome.

  Lyon had reason to dislike him, Saul knew. And soon he’d have even more reason.

  Now Petrov paced from one end of the overstuffed living room to the other, kicking the day’s newspapers out of his way and toward the fireplace. He was losing patience. What should he tell the cops? What should he keep for himself? Maybe he’d wait until the pictures were developed. He’d told the cops the truth. He had sent them off to his lab. But not all. He’d kept one roll back. One roll that might make him enough money to finally retire and maybe buy this place, and get to know the people of Three Pines. And maybe even find that fantastic artist whose portfolio CC had trashed.

  He smiled to himself. CC might not have found her treasure in Three Pines, but he had. He picked up the small roll of film and looked at it, black and hard in his palm. He was an ethical man, though his ethics were situational and this was a very promising situation indeed.

  ‘Vous avez dit “l’Aquitaine”? J’ai besoin de parler à quelqu’un làbas? Mais pourquoi?’ Isabelle Lacoste was struggling to keep the annoyance out of her voice. She knew the person she was most annoyed at was herself. She felt stupid. It was not something she felt often, but here was a quite patient and apparently intelligent agent with the Sûreté in Paris telling her to call the Aquitaine. She didn’t even know what the Aquitaine was.

  ‘What is the Aquitaine?’ she had to ask. Not to would have been even stupider.

  ‘It’s a region in France,’ he said, his voice in his nose. Still, it was a nice voice and he wasn’t trying to make her feel bad, just trying to give her information.

  ‘Why would I want to call there?’ This was turning into a game.

  ‘Because of the names you gave me, of course. Eleanor de Poitiers. Eleanor of Aquitaine. Here’s the number of the local gendarmerie there.’

  He’d given her the number and the officer there had also laughed and said no, she couldn’t speak to Eleanor de Poitiers, ‘unless you’re planning to die in the next moment’.

  ‘What do you mean?’ She was getting tired of hearing laughter, and getting tired of asking the same question. Still, working with Armand Gamache she’d watched his near endless supply of patience and knew that was what was called for here.

  ‘She’s dead,’ the constable said.

  ‘Dead? Murdered?’

  More laughter.

  ‘If you have something to tell me, please do.’ She’d practice patience tomorrow.

  ‘Think about it. Eleanor de Poitiers.’ He said it very slowly and loudly as though that would help. ‘I must go. My shift ends at ten o’clock.’

  He hung up. Lacoste automatically checked her watch. Quarter past four. In Quebec. Quarter past ten in France. The man had at least given her extra time.

  But to what end?

  She looked around. Gamache and Beauvoir had left. So had Agent Nichol.

  Turning back to her computer Agent Lacoste went to Google and typed in ‘Eleanor of Aquitaine’.

  NINETEEN

  The walls of the meditation room were a soothing aqua. The floor was carpeted in a deep, warm green. The ceiling was cathedral and a fan moved lazily around. Some pillows were piled in the corners, awaiting bottoms, Gamache guessed.

  He and Beauvoir had driven into St-Rémy to visit Mother Bea at her meditation center. He turned around, taking in the floor to ceiling windows looking into the darkness. All he could see was his own reflection, and Beauvoir behind him standing as though he’d entered the Gates of Hell.

  ‘You expecting some spirit to attack?’

  ‘You never know.’

  ‘I thought you were an atheist.’

  ‘I don’t believe in God, but there might be ghosts. Do you smell something?’

  ‘It’s incense.’

  ‘I think it’s making me sick.’

  Gamache turned to the back wall. Written in fine calligraphy across the top was Be Calm. The name of Madame Mayer’s center was Be Calm. Coincidentally, it was also what CC had called her business and her book.

  Be Calm.

  Ironically, neither woman, from what he could tell, was gifted with calm.

  Below the words there was more writing on the wall. The sun had set and the room was lit discreetly. He couldn’t make out the writing from where he was so he moved closer but as he approached Mother arrived, her purple caftan billowing behind her and her hair sticking out like a firestorm.

  ‘Hello, welcome. Have you come for the five o’clock class?’

  ‘No, madame.’ Gamache smiled. ‘We came

to visit you, to ask for your help.’

  Mother stood in front of him, warily. She seemed a woman used to traps, or at least to imagining them.

  ‘It’s obvious to me you’re a woman of sensitivities. You see and feel things others don’t. I hope I’m not being presumptuous.’

  ‘I don’t think I’m any more intuitive than anyone else,’ she said. ‘If anything I’ve been blessed to have been able to work on myself. Probably because I needed it more than most.’ She smiled at Gamache and ignored Beauvoir.

  ‘The enlightened are always the last to say it,’ said Gamache. ‘We wanted to speak to you in private, madame, to get your help. We need your insights on Madame de Poitiers.’

  ‘I didn’t know her well.’

  ‘But you wouldn’t have to, would you? You’re a teacher; you see so many people from all walks. You probably know them better than they know themselves.’

  ‘I try not to be judgmental, Chief Inspector.’

  ‘Not judgment, madame, discernment.’

  ‘CC de Poitiers was, I believe, in a lot of pain.’ Mother led them over to a gathering of pillows and indicated one. Gamache sat, more or less falling the last third of the way down. He only just stopped himself from tumbling over backwards. Beauvoir decided not to risk it. Besides, it was ridiculous and perhaps even insulting to offer a homicide investigator a pillow to sit on.

  Mother lowered herself expertly, landing in the center of the crimson pillow like a paratrooper. Granted, she hadn’t all that far to fall.

  ‘A lost soul, I believe. Had she not been murdered and had she had the humility to ask I believe I could have helped her.’

  Beauvoir thought maybe he was going to throw up.

  ‘She came here once, you know. I was heartened to see her, imagining she’d come to seek guidance. But I was wrong.’

  ‘What did she want?’

  ‘I have no idea.’ Now Mother looked genuinely puzzled. It was, Beauvoir thought, the first real thing about her. ‘I came in and she was standing over there, straightening the pictures.’ Mother indicated some framed photographs on the wall and a couple on what looked like a small shrine. ‘She had her fingers on everything in the room. Everything had been moved.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘Well, kind of lined up. When the classes are over the students just toss the pillows into the corners, as you can see. I like it like that. It’s God’s will where the pillows land. I don’t like imposing myself too much.’

  Another wave of nausea washed over Beauvoir.

  ‘But CC didn’t seem to be able to enter a room without touching and straightening everything. Very unevolved. No room for the spirit if you need to do that. All the cushions were neatly stacked and lined up with the wall, all the pictures in perfect alignment, everything just so.’

  ‘Why did she come here?’ Gamache asked.

  ‘I don’t really know. When she saw me she looked surprised, as though I’d caught her doing something wrong. After she left I looked around to see if anything was missing, she’d looked so guilty. She tried to cover it up by being aggressive. Very typical.’

  ‘Of what?’ Gamache asked.

  The question seemed to stump Mother and Beauvoir wondered whether she wasn’t used to being questioned.

  ‘Well, of unhappy people, of course,’ she snipped after a moment. ‘I had the impression she was looking for something, and I don’t mean enlightenment. I think she was so deluded she actually thought she had that. But a less enlightened person would be hard to find.’

  ‘Very discerning of you,’ said Gamache. Mother looked closely for signs of sarcasm. ‘What makes you think she thought she was enlightened?’

  ‘Have you read her book? It’s smug and self-satisfied. She had no center, no real beliefs. She grabbed whatever philosophy floated by. A bit of this, a bit of that. She’d cobbled together a bumpy, pitted, muddy spiritual path. It reminded me of Frankenstein. She’d cannibalized all sorts of faiths and beliefs and came up with that Li Bien.’

  The word ‘crap’ was implied.

  ‘She wasn’t balanced.’ Mother lifted her arms and spread them out in what looked like an embrace, the folds of her purple caftan dripping down so that she resembled something out of a Renaissance painting, by a not very good artist.

  ‘Tell me about Li Bien,’ Gamache said.

  ‘It has something to do with holding emotions inside. She seemed to think emotions were at the root of all our problems, so the trick was to not show them and best of all not feel them.’

  ‘And Li Bien itself, is that an ancient teaching, like Zen?’

  ‘Li Bien? Never heard of it. As far as I know, she made it up.’

  Gamache, who’d read CC de Poitiers’s book, was interested to see that Mother, while strictly accurate, had left some crucial pieces out. Like the Li Bien ball. The basis of CC de Poitiers’s teachings and the one thing passed on to her from a long dead mother. She talked about it in some detail in the book and it had struck Gamache as the only part of her story that was actually meaningful to her. It was as though CC had indeed been given this gift from her mother and knew it to be precious, but didn’t know how or why. And so she’d manufactured an entire belief system around it.

  She made the Li Bien ball into something holy. And now it was nowhere to be found. He’d had agents search her home in the Notre Dame de Grace quartier of Montreal. They’d come up with nothing, except a desire to leave its antiseptic atmosphere. Agents had again searched the old Hadley house, and found nothing.

  Of course, it was possible he was wrong and the Li Bien ball never existed. Maybe Mother was right and she’d made that up too.

  ‘Wasn’t there something about light too?’ he asked, wondering what Mother would say to that.

  ‘Well, yes, but that was even more convoluted. She seemed to think anything light or white was spiritual and colors, like red or blue, were evil. She even went so far as to assign each color an emotion. Red was anger, blue was depression, yellow was cowardice or fear, something like that. I can’t remember, except that it was pretty weird. I don’t know if she believed it herself, but the message she was peddling was that the lighter and whiter you were the better.’

  ‘Was she a racist?’

  Mother hesitated. It seemed to Gamache she was longing to paint CC in as bad a light as possible, and racist was pretty bad. But, to give her credit, she didn’t.

  ‘I don’t think so. I think she was talking about interior stuff. Emotions and feelings. Her idea was that if all our emotions are kept inside, and if they’re in alignment, then we’re balanced.’

  ‘What did she mean by alignment?’

  ‘You must remember science class? This is where CC was actually quite clever, and very dangerous in my opinion. She’d take something that had a bit of truth or fact and then stretch it beyond recognition. In science we learn that white is the presence of all colors. If you combine them all you get white, whereas black is the absence of color. So, according to CC, if emotions are colors and you’re emotional, angry, sad, jealous, whatever, then one color is dominant and you’re out of balance. The idea is to achieve white. All colors, all emotions, in alignment.’

  All Beauvoir heard was blah, blah, blah. He’d long since stopped paying attention and was staring at a poster of India on the wall, trying to pretend he was standing on the barren mountain beside the man in the loincloth. Anything was better than this.

  ‘Was she right?’

  Mother was taken aback by the simple question.

  ‘No, she wasn’t right. Her beliefs were ludicrous and insulting. She advised people to swallow their emotions. Her book, if followed by anyone, would lead to serious mental illness. She was nuts.’

  Mother took a deep breath and tried to recover her own balance.

  ‘And yet,’ Gamache continued in a pleasant voice, ‘isn’t that what’s often taught in meditation? Not the absence of emotion, or swallowing them, but not allowing them to run the show? And isn’t one of the disciplines in meditation the chakras?’

  ‘Yes, that’s true, but that’s different. I myself teach the chakra method of meditation. I learned it from him.’ She pointed to the poster Beauvoir had entered. ‘In India. It’s a method for achieving balance, inside and out. There are seven centers in the body, from the top of your head to, well, your privates. Each has a color, and when they’re in alignment you’re balanced. If you’re interested, come to one of my classes. In fact, one’s about to start.’

  She rocked herself out of the cushion and to her feet. Gamache also got up, but slightly less gracefully. She waddled toward the door, hurrying them out. Gamache stopped and looked more closely at the writing on the wall.

  Be Calm, and know that I am God.

  ‘That’s beautiful,’ he said. ‘It sounds familiar.’

  Did Mother hesitate a moment before answering?

  ‘It’s from Isaiah.’

  ‘You called your center Be Calm. Did you get the name from this?’ He nodded toward the wall.

  ‘Yes. I’m a little embarrassed about having what’s essentially a Christian saying on my walls, but this is an inclusive community. The people who come here to do yoga and meditate believe all sorts of things. Some are Christians, some Jews, some follow the Buddha, some lean more toward the Hindu teachings. We take what’s meaningful from each faith. We’re not dogmatic here.’

  Gamache noticed that when she did it, it was a virtue, whereas when CC did it it was grotesque.

  ‘Though Isaiah is the Old Testament, so you’re off the Christian hook.’ Gamache smiled. ‘Why did you choose that particular saying?’

  ‘It’s actually quite close to the Buddhist belief that if we’re quiet and calm we’ll find God,’ Mother explained. ‘It’s a beautiful thought.’

  ‘It is indeed,’ said Gamache, and meant it. ‘Quiet and calm.’ He turned away from the saying and looked down directly into the eyes of the elderly woman beside him. ‘And still.’

  Mother barely hesitated. ‘And still, Chief Inspector.’

  ‘Merci, Madame.’ He put a firm hand on Beauvoir’s arm and guided him to the door. Beauvoir didn’t even bother zipping his coat. He dived out the door and into the frigid evening feeling as though he’d plunged into a cold mountain stream. He coughed and sputtered as the freezing air hit his lungs, but he didn’t care. He was finally coming back to his senses.

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